It's funny to me that The Looker seems to work really well as a parody both for people who hated The Witness and people who loved The Witness. It's making fun of the silly things in the game with some good comedy, but it also has genuinely neat puzzle mechanics that it explores lots of different aspects of, which is exactly what a fan of The Witness would be into. It's the best kind of parody, the kind that's also just good on its own merits.
I think it says something along the lines of this on the Steam page! Something like, “If you liked The Witness, you’ll like The Looker. If you hated The Witness, you’ll LOVE The Looker.” EDIT: I was wrong, it was originally a review that said that. It may or may not be somewhere on the Steam page too
The dev has also said they loved the witness and it genuinely impacted their life. I feel like you can only do a really good parody if you actually like the thing.
As grandmaster Bobby Fischer said, "You can only get good at chess if you love the game." As world champion Bobby Fischer also said, "I hate chess, I hate chess. I hate chess."
This was a good reward for suffering through The Witness. Would have loved to see more of the late-game stuff get lampooned though, since it really turned into hot garbage at the end.
"I hate Deepak Chopra" The Chopra quote is subtly the funniest part of this game. Every other quote has been modified to be ridiculous, hammy, and hilarious. But the Deepak Chopra quote is given to you straight, unmodified. The implication is that despite Chopra being 100% dead serious, the shit he says in that quote is just as completely fucking stupid as Marco Polo trying to do a nigerian prince scam on Kublai Khan or Gravity's Rainbow giving Ultraviolet Girl huge cans.
When looking into the telescope, if you're on a platform with achievements, you get one called "Why did you do that?" I had a friend recommend me The Witness far back in the day (and it was precisely the right kind of game for me, I didn't find much of the environmental stuff, but all the vanilla puzzles on all the panels gave me one terriffic weekend of binging). And then after I came across The Looker, I recommended it to him. I laughed just from seeing that he had that achievement. And then I teased him about it the next time we talked.
I know this may be blasphemy but i enjoyed this game so much more than the witness Also, the reason the kids menu is so strange is because they can’t have both S and E with a possible line between them
the random scribbling whenever you weren't willing to interract with a panel's design choice is a bit of a shame since it misses out on a couple of actual good puzzle moments you would've liked, but glad you had fun
Missing the puzzle on the do not enter sign is kind of important since it teaches you that *any* S and E work, and then it also kinda ruined the final joke unfortunately.
The thing about The Witness is that, like, yeah it doesn't ever reward you for solving puzzles other than with more puzzles. That's because it's designed for people for whom solving puzzles IS its own reward. For me, there's an intrinsic joy and satisfaction to cracking open a tough puzzle, and The Witness just keeps giving me more and more puzzles that are satisfying to solve. But like, yeah, it's not exactly full of extrinsic rewards. There's too many puzzles in the game to come up with unique extrnisic rewards for every one, and personally - as The Witness' target audience - I'm glad they focused their work on making and polishing puzzles instead of on tricking people who don't like puzzles into thinking they achieved anything other than solving puzzles. C'est la vie.
... I'd agree that the Kaizo puzzles in the mountain can get kinda rough sometimes though, especially the ones that fuck with the display. (Though I like the puzzle where you have to figure out how the color shifting effect applies to each individual color; that one was fun to crack.) But honestly those are outliers? It's a little bit at the end to raise the stakes, and even the hardest parts of the postgame don't really do that kind of thing again.
Well said! I loved the Witness for the same reasons I love doing crosswords or a sudoku. It's the puzzles themselves that are fun to solve, and completing a solve *is* the reward!
The problem with The Witness is that once you solve a puzzle, as in figure out the mechanics/rules of the new system, it just slams you with increasingly tedious applications of those mechanics. They take an interesting idea and stretch it out as far as they possibly can. Repeatedly reapplying a solution you already figured out is not really puzzle solving.
I never thought watching carl play this would be more infuriating than the witness. When the painting kept saying "add more loops" and he did literally everything but add more loops over and over i wanted to choke someone 😂
Carlblind is so real. Seeing you stare at a puzzle for several seconds and just.. not see it. or literally try the same thing over and over when the game is, literally, telling you what to do will never not be funny.
I also feel like because you dont actually pay attention to anything happening you end up hating long form puzzle games that slowly teach you things VS single short puzzles like MM which dont require you to retain information for more than 1 puzzle.
@alittar8062 I loved outer wilds so your entire point is incorrect. My dislike for some of the witness had nothing to do with "not paying attention" -- I get my fill of that kind of thing doing science such that I don't want to do more of it in my hobbies.
@@CarlPlayin42 I find it interesting that you feel like you get your fill of that doing science and don't want that in your hobbies....but MM troll levels are a lot of this
THANK YOU! I'VE BEEN TRYING TO REMEMBER THE NAME OF THIS GAME FOR WEEKS AND YOUR VIDEO POPPED UP! You're my best friend now. Don't tell my best friend. We can make this work.
First time I see gameplay of this. Normally I would never watch a new game by a random TH-camr that I don't know, but since it's you I always give a watch because I know you well enough and can expect many laughs. I didn't know Juz played it too. He has also many good laughs, so I think I'm going to see his stream after.
my the looker experience was not knowing exactly what happens in the witness and being genuinely intrigued by the looker's gameplay not realizing it was a parody...
what you say about the witness was my reaction to lingo, the start is neat, but later it becomes kinda bs when you get to "remove any number of letters add any number of letters" it's just trying words that may go at this point.
i literally made a brute forcer for this game, its a fun concept of a game, but it falls flat when there can be multiple working solutions yet only one will solve the puzzle
@ thats actually not that bad of an idea, but it would likely be hard to find which solution corresponds to where without spoiling other puzzles in the game
I'm that slim majority that actually likes solving puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles, so I loved The Witness, but I understand that for a casual player it's a really tough sell.
you managed to do the snake game, but you were given a pity win. the real win is for your to fill up the whole screen with snek before getting the first 'end' so there is no vallid place for another to be spawned.
That might be an alternative win condition, but the end doesn't care about whether you've drawn where it will spawn; that can be seen at 49:23 I think the 'normal' solution is to just pass a certain number of rounds since the end always appears in the same place
It's funny to me that The Looker seems to work really well as a parody both for people who hated The Witness and people who loved The Witness. It's making fun of the silly things in the game with some good comedy, but it also has genuinely neat puzzle mechanics that it explores lots of different aspects of, which is exactly what a fan of The Witness would be into. It's the best kind of parody, the kind that's also just good on its own merits.
I think it says something along the lines of this on the Steam page! Something like, “If you liked The Witness, you’ll like The Looker. If you hated The Witness, you’ll LOVE The Looker.”
EDIT: I was wrong, it was originally a review that said that. It may or may not be somewhere on the Steam page too
The dev has also said they loved the witness and it genuinely impacted their life. I feel like you can only do a really good parody if you actually like the thing.
As grandmaster Bobby Fischer said, "You can only get good at chess if you love the game." As world champion Bobby Fischer also said, "I hate chess, I hate chess. I hate chess."
I love the witness and this was a great tribute to it. Im a big fan of puzzles and parodies. So it works.
@@Bspammer Oh, that's disappointing. My favorite thing about The Looker was how unreservedly mean it was to the moron and his garbage.
The best part about playing The Witness is that you get to play The Looker afterwards
This was a good reward for suffering through The Witness. Would have loved to see more of the late-game stuff get lampooned though, since it really turned into hot garbage at the end.
"I hate Deepak Chopra"
The Chopra quote is subtly the funniest part of this game. Every other quote has been modified to be ridiculous, hammy, and hilarious. But the Deepak Chopra quote is given to you straight, unmodified. The implication is that despite Chopra being 100% dead serious, the shit he says in that quote is just as completely fucking stupid as Marco Polo trying to do a nigerian prince scam on Kublai Khan or Gravity's Rainbow giving Ultraviolet Girl huge cans.
When looking into the telescope, if you're on a platform with achievements, you get one called "Why did you do that?"
I had a friend recommend me The Witness far back in the day (and it was precisely the right kind of game for me, I didn't find much of the environmental stuff, but all the vanilla puzzles on all the panels gave me one terriffic weekend of binging). And then after I came across The Looker, I recommended it to him. I laughed just from seeing that he had that achievement. And then I teased him about it the next time we talked.
I know this may be blasphemy but i enjoyed this game so much more than the witness
Also, the reason the kids menu is so strange is because they can’t have both S and E with a possible line between them
Nah what you enjoy is up to you lol, I love The Witness and I also love The Looker.
A smart, well-executed thing taking itself less seriously is always more fun than a smart, well-executed thing taking itself way too seriously
@@matthewgiallourakis7645 I don’t think The Witness took itself too seriously.
the random scribbling whenever you weren't willing to interract with a panel's design choice is a bit of a shame since it misses out on a couple of actual good puzzle moments you would've liked, but glad you had fun
Yeah, was a bit of Pigeon Chess, there.
To be fair, he was already sick and tired of these from Tge Witness
Missing the puzzle on the do not enter sign is kind of important since it teaches you that *any* S and E work, and then it also kinda ruined the final joke unfortunately.
On the other hand, cheesing puzzles felt absolutely GREAT after 20 hours of the witness XD
28:01 "Snék is friend, always trust Snék."
I love the looker! Ah I mean.. BEEP!
the carl witness/looker saga will be remembered fondly, thanks for the uploads!
Carl, have you played Chants of Sennaar yet? It's a short and sweet puzzle game where you decode fictive writing systems.
I think you'd enjoy it.
Chants of Senaar dating sim when
@@naplockblubba5369 I was gonna question what you wrote, but then I understood. I just never saw it that way. 😂
@@danielkarlsson5161 My sister loves that game and we've joked about what a Dating Sim in that style would be like
I've been suggesting it too! Chants of Sennaar is AMAZING!
To me the satisfaction of The Witness WAS understanding the puzzle rules. Some of them were a little too hard to figure out without context though
yesssssss!! i saw you were playing the witness and was like "he HAS to play the looker next." was so excited to see this in my sub box!
The thing about The Witness is that, like, yeah it doesn't ever reward you for solving puzzles other than with more puzzles. That's because it's designed for people for whom solving puzzles IS its own reward. For me, there's an intrinsic joy and satisfaction to cracking open a tough puzzle, and The Witness just keeps giving me more and more puzzles that are satisfying to solve. But like, yeah, it's not exactly full of extrinsic rewards. There's too many puzzles in the game to come up with unique extrnisic rewards for every one, and personally - as The Witness' target audience - I'm glad they focused their work on making and polishing puzzles instead of on tricking people who don't like puzzles into thinking they achieved anything other than solving puzzles. C'est la vie.
... I'd agree that the Kaizo puzzles in the mountain can get kinda rough sometimes though, especially the ones that fuck with the display. (Though I like the puzzle where you have to figure out how the color shifting effect applies to each individual color; that one was fun to crack.) But honestly those are outliers? It's a little bit at the end to raise the stakes, and even the hardest parts of the postgame don't really do that kind of thing again.
Well said! I loved the Witness for the same reasons I love doing crosswords or a sudoku. It's the puzzles themselves that are fun to solve, and completing a solve *is* the reward!
The problem with The Witness is that once you solve a puzzle, as in figure out the mechanics/rules of the new system, it just slams you with increasingly tedious applications of those mechanics. They take an interesting idea and stretch it out as far as they possibly can. Repeatedly reapplying a solution you already figured out is not really puzzle solving.
Nothing wrong with that, sounds like a game made for you! I prefer story and music and such, personally. It's okay to like different things.
Yup, fully agree. Sometimes the reward is getting to the solution and the intrinsic fun in that!
The Witness is just edging for puzzle game aficionados.
Holy flip it took me 20 minutes to get a score of 600 but you got it first try.
I never thought watching carl play this would be more infuriating than the witness. When the painting kept saying "add more loops" and he did literally everything but add more loops over and over i wanted to choke someone 😂
Carlblind is so real. Seeing you stare at a puzzle for several seconds and just.. not see it. or literally try the same thing over and over when the game is, literally, telling you what to do will never not be funny.
I also feel like because you dont actually pay attention to anything happening you end up hating long form puzzle games that slowly teach you things VS single short puzzles like MM which dont require you to retain information for more than 1 puzzle.
@@alittar8062'Tis the eternal struggle of being a streamer with added painful amounts of ADHD.
@alittar8062 I loved outer wilds so your entire point is incorrect. My dislike for some of the witness had nothing to do with "not paying attention" -- I get my fill of that kind of thing doing science such that I don't want to do more of it in my hobbies.
@@CarlPlayin42 I find it interesting that you feel like you get your fill of that doing science and don't want that in your hobbies....but MM troll levels are a lot of this
THANK YOU! I'VE BEEN TRYING TO REMEMBER THE NAME OF THIS GAME FOR WEEKS AND YOUR VIDEO POPPED UP!
You're my best friend now. Don't tell my best friend. We can make this work.
I'm so glad Carl interacted with most of the things, so many playthroughs just skipped the old hint button.
My favorite puzzle game of recent times has been superliminal. 10/10
as soon as i saw the witness playthrough i KNEW this had to happen
I actually started expecting a tip to say "Tip: Click here to begin"
First time I see gameplay of this. Normally I would never watch a new game by a random TH-camr that I don't know, but since it's you I always give a watch because I know you well enough and can expect many laughs.
I didn't know Juz played it too. He has also many good laughs, so I think I'm going to see his stream after.
my the looker experience was not knowing exactly what happens in the witness and being genuinely intrigued by the looker's gameplay not realizing it was a parody...
this is going to be perfect after i finish going through your witness playthrough
I just finished watching Juz's playthrough and there were very different strategies between you two😂
Can you play Viewfinder next if you haven't? ☺
Reminds me of Myst but funny. And fun.
I got to a point in Witness where I had no idea what the rules for the puzzle were even supposed to be, which is where I quit.
the ship audio log killed me, i either didnt see it before or forgot
what you say about the witness was my reaction to lingo, the start is neat, but later it becomes kinda bs when you get to "remove any number of letters add any number of letters" it's just trying words that may go at this point.
i literally made a brute forcer for this game, its a fun concept of a game, but it falls flat when there can be multiple working solutions yet only one will solve the puzzle
@@cipeman3498 tbh at this point you can just get the solutions from the game file
@ thats actually not that bad of an idea, but it would likely be hard to find which solution corresponds to where without spoiling other puzzles in the game
@@cipeman3498 grep -A4 [prompt] works iirc
Though it will still spoil others with the same prompt.
Can't wait to watch this after 9 more hours of witness content
I enjoyed The Looker even though I never even dared to touch The Witness.
It's just really, really funny.
I'm kinda surprised the Looker didn't have the Hall of the Mountain King.
could you maybe also try the game Grunn? i'd love to see you play that :D
hehe this game truly lets you master pixel perfect mouse movement 😂
The Witness is amazing.
So sad I missed it live! I will enjoy the video instead ❤
100 hours?? Only took me 47! Lol, still a lot. But I love puzzles.
I'm that slim majority that actually likes solving puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles, so I loved The Witness, but I understand that for a casual player it's a really tough sell.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, i like it too but I get that at work and don't seek it out from games.
Beep/Beep would recommend!
LET'S GOOOOOO
Beep.
@ 57:00 just a sound "pew pew - Laser" would have been funny.
Should I watch the witness playthru b4 I watch this?
Given Carl's review I'm glad I didn't watch the witness first.
@@mikecannon3517It's absolutely something to be played not watched. The game has no inherent story, not inherent meaning even.
Don't you work with infectious diseases? How is your alt channel not called CarlPlaguin42?
I felt the same about the witness
Beep. BEEEEEP
this was a better game than the witness. was this a mod?
It's its own game
Freeware, totally independent
Peak gaming
You play like a streamer. I am looking for a gamer.
I get the same amount of wisdom from these random bullshit quotes as I do from the long philosophical quotes of The Witness
you managed to do the snake game, but you were given a pity win. the real win is for your to fill up the whole screen with snek before getting the first 'end' so there is no vallid place for another to be spawned.
That might be an alternative win condition, but the end doesn't care about whether you've drawn where it will spawn; that can be seen at 49:23
I think the 'normal' solution is to just pass a certain number of rounds since the end always appears in the same place
Except his attempts showed that the ends would just replace a spot in the line if he had drawn over it
beep
Beep
beep
beep
beep
beeeeeeeep, i mean beep
beep
beep
beep
beep
Wow, you found it.
gggg
first